


tender mercy

by albertine_disparue



Category: Charité
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, Major Illness, Period-Typical Homophobia, Self-Harm, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, oh jeez the trigger warnings just keep getting worse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2019-05-14 17:43:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14774216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/albertine_disparue/pseuds/albertine_disparue
Summary: Therese gives up hope, but hope doesn't want to leave.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> AU starting from the end of episode four. This might only be read or appreciated by like two people but I accept that.

> _and cold sweat holds me and shaking_   
>  _grips me all, greener than grass_   
>  _I am and dead—or almost_   
>  _I seem to me._

Therese had seen patients being exhibited before the doctors and students; her standing demurely back; the patient she wheeled in embarrassed, shy, defiant, cold; the lecturer speaking no differently than he would while presenting with a mannequin. Therese had never thought that she would be the patient in the chair, nor had she wondered how she would feel under the cold, intent gaze of the crowd.

Almost involuntarily, her hand reached out behind her, toward Ida. When she felt the other's hand warm and rough on hers, she jumped as though she had touched a candle flame. She didn't look back, afraid it would break whatever spell was keeping Ida from being repulsed by her polluted touch. For a moment Therese's mind was free of visions of hellfire and damned women, and the only two people in the room were her and the one she couldn't help but love.

The camera flashed.

* * *

Having looked their fill, the spectators filed out of the room while Koch explained the effects of tuberculin inoculation to Ida.

“Pulmonary patients are the most susceptible to the, er, adverse reactions. It comes on four or five hours after injection: increased fever, joint ache, fatigue. Within twelve it should have subsided enough for us to dose her again.”

“Again?”

“Yes. Repeated injections, steadily increasing the dosage as the patient builds tolerance—”

“Twelve hours is too soon for it to be the result of tolerance, isn't it?”

Koch flashed Ida a cold warning glance and continued as though he hadn't been talked back to by an assistant nurse.

“—and eventually her condition will stabilize and improve.”

“And how long will that take?” Her voice was trembling with the effort to keep her tone neutral.

“Difficult to say. Most of the trials so far have been on lupus patients. Perhaps a month. Now excuse me, Assistant Nurse Lenze, but I have business to attend to. Good day.”

Koch bowed curtly and left.

Ida sighed as she and Therese shared a long gaze.

“Ida Lenze versus the mighty Robert Koch,” said Therese.

“The nerve of that man!” exclaimed Ida, sitting on Therese’s bed as though they were gossiping in the dormitory. “He has no idea how his drug works, and everyone plays along because he's supposed to be this infallible genius!”

Therese smiled to see her friend so passionate and confident, even if it meant going against the whole world. She wished she could see what a fine doctor she would make one day.

“Will you be on shift tonight?” asked Therese as Ida turned to leave. Ida flashed her a determined look as she squeezed her hand, and then Therese was alone.

She felt her knuckles burning for a long time after.


	2. Chapter 2

> _Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness._

Night fell all too slowly. Therese’s bones hurt, she was exhausted, but she didn't dare fall asleep for fear of what her dreams would hold. So she prayed.

Dear Lord, I know I have sinned against Thee. I will accept my punishment without complaining, only please, don’t make her suffer for my sake, waiting for weeks, or months. Please, just let me die...

Her thoughts trailed off into hazy, disorganized phrases, and she wasn't sure if she had fallen asleep when she was startled by Ida coming in.

Ida's face, which had been stern and closed-off, started to melt into worry as her eyes met Therese’s. She was carrying a bowl and a rag, for the fever no doubt, but the image of the Magdalene washing Christ's feet came to Therese's mind unbidden.

Ida knelt by the bed like a child coming to its parents after a nightmare.

"I hardly even need the thermometer, Therese," she murmured, and she sat silent for a moment. "But we'll need your temperature anyway, for the board."

Therese felt her heart beat faster—what if she had to take her arms out of her gown, what if Ida saw—and with trembling hands she pulled the neckline of her gown down below her shoulder.

"That'll do," said Ida. Therese swore she could have seen her blush a little—fearless, formidable Ida— but it must have been the lamp flickering. The mercury, of course, was rising almost imperceptibly slowly, and the two of them were uncomfortably close; Therese could feel Ida's breath on her skin, and it made her heart throb.

"You shouldn't be doing this, Ida, you'll get sick too," she said.

"You’re my friend," Ida replied without meeting her eyes. The lamp flickered again.

They were silent for a while when Ida suddenly asked,

"What made you want to become a deaconess?"

It knocked Therese off balance. It was an obvious enough question, and nobody had asked her before. Even her parents had just silently accepted her choice without asking or pleading. She sighed as much as she could without it turning into a cough.

"It was a calling, I wanted to help people, I wanted to serve God...” she began.

“And?” A little bit of Ida’s old teasing tone crept back into her voice.

“And I ran away. From marriage, and family, things I just couldn’t do. This was the best way out."

Therese turned her head to cough, wincing at the taste of blood, and Ida turned somber again.

"And for a while everything seemed fine, but I couldn't ignore it forever. God always saw it, the dead bones and filth on the inside."

When she looked back, Ida's gaze was soft and compassionate and innocent, and it was as unbearable as looking into the sun.

“38,2,” Ida read off the thermometer. As she got up to mark it on the board, Therese sighed.

“What is it?” Ida asked, wetting the cloth she had almost forgotten.

_I’m trying to die, I was prepared to, and now it’s all up in the air—_

“I just don’t know how to feel about anything anymore,” Therese replied. Ida smiled sympathetically as she laid the cloth on Therese’s forehead. Therese’s breath caught in her throat; Ida apologized for the coldness of the water, and Therese just murmured “It’s fine,” hoping her embarrassment wasn’t too evident.

“Well, this is all new,” said Ida. “It can’t be easy being Koch’s new guinea pig, having no choice but to trust his word that tuberculin works.” She smiled slightly and turned to leave. Of course she had a great deal of work to do between nursing and studying and juggling Behring and Tischendorf, and Therese had certainly kept her from it long enough. The door closed softly behind her, and Therese was left alone with her mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for being patient, y'all, the last month has been crazy and I haven't had any time to write. Thanks especially to providers of kudos and comments; this is the first fic I've published for a 'grown-up' fandom, so I'm a little self-conscious and your encouragement means a lot. (And please forgive the comma in place of a decimal point: it felt wrong to write a point when the characters would use a comma)


	3. Chapter 3

> _Lying on the sand like ruminating cattle_  
>  _They turn their eyes toward the horizon of the sea,_  
>  _And their clasped hands and their feet which seek the other's_  
>  _Know both sweet languor and shudders of pain._  
> 

It was a cloudy day in late autumn. The wind was chilling and mournful, driving the gray-brown sea against the stones of a breakwater, where the foam looked like lace being thrown over a table. Only a couple of forlorn birds skittered across the beach as two young women walked side by side. 

"Didn't you ever get lonely, Therese? I mean, moving to a new city where you don't know anyone, all you have is your work..." 

"Not when God is with me." Therese smiled slightly, looking down at her feet. 

"Always so quick with the right answer," Stephanie laughed. She looked the same as she had when they were probationers together, even in a smart dress with her dark hair uncovered and ruffled by the wind. 

"It's true, though," Therese replied. "God calls me to it, and I don't question Him." 

"So He called you to Berlin?" The smile didn't leave Stephanie's voice, but her tone had suddenly sobered almost imperceptibly. Their steps faltered, and Therese turned to look at the sea. 

"I'm not a good liar," she said. 

"Then tell the truth." 

"Sometimes I think He sent me there to do penance." She tried to say more, to explain herself, but the words wouldn't come out. Far off, she saw a loon dive into the dark water. 

"For what?" 

"To—make me focus on my work, I suppose, I was too distracted—" 

"By what?" Stephanie took a step closer. Therese turned her head, and their eyes met for a moment. 

"I was in love with you," Therese said. She waited for the disgust to show in Stephanie's face, for her to turn around and leave. Instead, her face remained shocked, like she was struggling to understand what Therese had said. 

"I loved you too," she said softly. 

"Please don't mock me," Therese replied. It had to be a joke, she would never, she thought. 

And then Stephanie softly kissed her. 

For a long time they stood facing each other, amazed and breathless. Stephanie took Therese's hand in hers and led her down to the edge of the surf. She waded out fearlessly, then stopped and turned round, asking Therese to follow her. 

The water didn't even feel cold, just heavy as it soaked into her clothes, reaching higher and higher until she had to swim. Stephanie made it look effortless. She floated ahead, stopping every so often to make sure Therese was still following. Therese tried to keep up, but it was so hard to stay afloat. The farther out she went, the farther ahead Stephanie swam, and the more of an effort it took to push the water away. 

God, she was so tired. And the water felt comfortable, like a bed piled heavy with quilts. She almost didn't notice as she slowly let herself sink down. When she came back to consciousness, it was more as an observer of her own body, a mildly curious onlooker. She still held her breath, falling little by little into the murky water as she considered what she was doing. 

If she started swimming again, she would reach the surface, breathe a lungful of air, and eventually get back to the shore. If she kept sinking into the ocean, she would drown. The decision didn't feel urgent at all, not like the panicked animal of her body fighting her for an answer, just an idle consideration. She looked up, watching the deepening water dim the pale gray sky, and she let out a long breath. 

* * *

Therese awoke slowly and laboriously, almost reluctantly. Her eyelids fluttered, fighting the sunlight reflecting off the walls. A dark shape moved around the edges of her vision—it was Ida, sweeping the floor of the bare little room. 

"Morning," she said. "Or afternoon. I'll let them know you're awake." 

When Ida returned, she gave Therese a piece of bread that she more picked at than ate. She knelt by the bed, looking at nothing in particular. 

"You need to eat," she said. 

"I know." An uncomfortable silence. 

"Doctor Koch wants to expand the tuberculin trial to more patients. They're going to move you all into one end of the tuberculosis ward." 

"Is that what you're worried about?" Therese asked. Ida shifted, looked away, turned back to her with difficulty. 

"Therese, how—" Ida broke off, couldn't meet her eyes, and Therese's blood ran cold—"how did you get those wounds on your arms?" 

Even beyond the fever, Therese felt her face burn, and she could not speak. She was mortified, reminded of how senseless and stupid what she was doing to herself was. It was the helpless "why" of her rational mind, the question it asked when she was cleaning the blood out of the sleeves of her nightgown, or wincing as she pulled off fresh scabs getting undressed for the night. 

Her voice felt distant and foreign as she finally answered. 

"I thought that if I hurt myself enough, it would fix me, that—I don't know." 

Hearing what she had been doing to herself put into words made it realer somehow, and it sickened her. She turned over in bed, away from Ida, feeling tears of shame well up in her eyes. 

"Will you at least let me dress the fresh ones?" Ida asked. She got up without receiving an answer—of course Ida wouldn't brook any debate—and Therese buried her face in the pillow and wept. She wished Ida would never come back, that the ground would swallow her up, that she would just die and go to hell and be done. 

Soon her sobs turned into a fit of coughing, and she reached for the spittoon by her bed. From merely bloody sputum she had gone to coughing up foul-smelling pus; the insides of her lungs were being eaten away by the disease, and she idly wondered how much worse hell could be than this. 

"Therese?" Ida asked gently, sitting down on the bed. 

"It's nothing, you know how it goes." Therese set the spittoon down, reluctantly turning to face Ida again—she thought what a sight she must be, face red and swollen and still wet with tears she hadn't yet dried away. 

"Yes, Doctor Koch keeps telling us that tuberculin is supposed to help by increasing the necrosis of infected tissue, starving out the bacilli," said Ida. She paused, thinking better of whatever she was about to say. Instead she gathered up her bandages, a rag and a little brown bottle. 

Ida's hands fluttered tentatively at the edge of her sleeve. 

"May I?" she asked, almost inaudibly. Therese just nodded, and Ida began to roll her sleeve up. 

"How...how far up do they go?" 

"Just on the forearms," Therese replied, feeling the wave of mortification rise up again. She looked up at the ceiling as her friend cleaned the blood off of her skin, stopping to wrap a bandage around a deeper cut across the delicate tendons at the base of her thumb. Ida ran her fingers gently across its ugly length, and Therese shivered. 

"You weren't... you weren't trying to..." Ida broke off, afraid to speak the rest of the question out loud. 

"No. Ida," and here she found the courage to look her friend in the eyes, "I wouldn't." 

It was just as much to remind herself. 

There was a certain irony that the alcoholic sting of the antiseptic hurt worse than the blade had, that it was more unbearable to submit to having her wounds tended to than to inflict them in the first place. The seconds crawled, she felt completely naked under Ida's gaze, and she could only imagine what was going through her mind. Ida's eyes were red and shining, but she didn't let the tears fall. 

"Was it because of me?" she asked, choking on the words. For all Therese had wished that Ida would leave her, the prospect of her actually doing it suddenly opened up in her mind, and she was terrified. 

"No," she blurted out, "no, it's my fault. Mine alone." 

Ida just looked at her, seeming even more wounded somehow. She sniffed and gathered up her things. 

"I should go. The matron doesn't like me 'spending disproportionate time with particular patients'." Therese almost tried to protest, but realized how selfish she was being. 

"She's right," she said instead. 

Ida flashed her a sad look as she left. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has read, kudos'ed, commented, and just generally been interested. Those who despaired of this ever being updated: to paraphrase the text of Mahler's second symphony, you have not lived and suffered in vain. It is 3 AM and I have no idea what I'm doing so that's probably why this chapter is Like That.  
> Epigraph from Baudelaire, "Femmes damnées -- comme un bétail pensif"  
> [a playlist for anyone interested](https://open.spotify.com/user/vbfdoee/playlist/4IjOlAVziJqwUnCEzyisYd)


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